It's a giant honor to be one of the first features on the newly redesigned BOOOOOOOM, the highly influential fine art and culture website. Jeff Hamada, the site's editor, reached out for this interview where I discuss my 15+ years of working on Fecal Face. Read a snippet below and/or the complete interview HERE.

If there was one website that inspired me to create Booooooom, without question it was Fecal Face. The art website that John Trippe created in 2000 quickly became the center of the universe for emerging artists, illustrators, photographers and skateboarders across the US and all over the world.

In 2008, he opened FFDG (Fecal Face dot Gallery) in San Francisco’s Mission district and continued to champion art and artists using both his physical and online spaces until early 2016. Then John and his wife Jessica moved their family to Portland, Fecal Face was officially put on ice, and the Internet was immediately worse. And it hasn’t improved since; algorithms are replacing human curation and pandering to audiences is at an all-time high. I had no choice but to contact John to ask him about the 15+ years he spent curating art, and to find out what it will take to bring him back.

Jeff Hamada: I graduated high school in 2000, the same year you started Fecal Face, and went straight into art school. I liked making art but I remember a classmate asking me who some of my favourite artists were and not being able to name a single one. Shortly after that I found your site and it was one of the first places I encountered art that I actually found interesting —artists like Dave Kinsey, Barry McGee, Jeremy Fish, Mike Giant— I’d never really seen anything like it. Can you talk a little bit about your first encounter with art where you felt a connection?

John Trippe: I spent my teenage years in Toledo, Ohio and they have an incredible art museum there, the Toledo Museum of Art. My first taste was wondering around in there. Next I would say it was growing up focused on skateboarding. There were so many weirdos involved in the skate scene during the mid 90s. All kinds of great ideas in writing, visual art, and humor permeated throughout skateboarding. So many great graphics, videos and magazines. It seemed like everyone was self-taught and skateboarding was all about the DIY ethos. So you have a small industry run by a bunch of creative weirdos, who were free to run wild and art-direct themselves. I absorbed all of it and was surrounded by it, so when I started the site there was so many creative people in my life having been working in skateboarding at the time. I just focused on my roommates, friends and skateboarders, and those associated in the industry. The site grew out of that.